Consumer community products such as online social networks and online forums often face a challenge in onboarding known entities such as celebrities, retailers and manufacturers. These brand entities are often great sources of content and great proxies for new member's lifestyle choices because of their popularity, making them critical for adoption and expansion of the community product. For many community products, failure to attract well established brand entities early results in the “empty room” problem because new members do not know or trust other members enough to subscribe to their content and are unwilling to do the work to get to know others. This is triggered by low content consumption, low subscription rates, and results in low creation from de-motivated content creators.
Early consumer community members (e.g., of a social network or forum) may share content about brand entities that have not themselves joined the community. This content, if distributed more widely, may have the ability to attract more interaction and community growth due to the popularity of the associated brand entity. Unfortunately, traditional relationship building on community products require community members to seek out content creators, many of whom they would not know. Without a clear mechanism for organizing relevant content regardless of prior relation to the content creator, consumer communities invariably suffer from the chicken-and-egg problem between content creation and discoverability.
While partnering with brand entities early in the life of a community product is desirable, brand entities may be hesitant to invest in a new marketing channel until they can be convinced of some return on investment (ROI). At the same time community products need them to attract members.